The interrelationship between financial constraints and firm activity is a hotly debated issue. The way firms cope with financial constraints is fundamental to the analysis of monetary transmission, of financial stability and of economic growth and development. The CBI Industrial Trends Survey...

We study solvency contagion risk in the UK banking system from 2008 to 2015. We develop a model that only accounts for losses transmitted after banks default, but also for losses due to the fact that creditors revalue their exposures when probabilities of default of their counterparties change....

'Zombie lending' occurs when a lender supports an otherwise insolvent borrower. Recent studies document that zombie lending to European firms has been widespread following the onset of the European sovereign debt crisis. This paper develops a quantitative model to study the impact of these...

Systemic risk in the banking sector is usually associated with long periods of economic downturn and very large social costs. On one hand, shocks coming from correlated exposures towards the real economy may induce correlation in banks’ default probabilities thereby increasing the likelihood...

We test whether a simple measure of corporate insolvency based on equity return volatility – and denoted as Distance to Insolvency (DI) – delivers better predictions of corporate default than the widely-used Expected Default Frequency (EDF) measure computed by Moody’s. We look at the...

This paper develops a model to analyse the optimal ex-ante capital and total loss absorbing capacity (TLAC) requirements, and the ex-post resolution policy of banks. Banks in our model are subject to two types of moral hazard: i) ex-ante, they have the incentive to shirk on project monitoring,...

Long-horizon interest rates in the major international bond markets fell sharply during 2004 and 2005, at the same time as US policy rates were rising; a phenomenon famously described as a 'conundrum' by Alan Greenspan the Federal Reserve Chairman. But it was arguably the decline in...

We present a general equilibrium model of intermediation designed to capture some of the key features of the modern financial system. The model incorporates financial constraints and state-contingent contracts, and captures the spillovers associated with asset fire sales during periods of...

This paper combines a structural vector autoregression (SVAR) with a no-arbitrage approach to build a multifactor affine term structure model (ATSM). The resulting no-arbitrage structural vector autoregressive (NA-SVAR) model implies that expected excess returns are driven by the structural...

This paper estimates yield curve models for the UK, where the underlying determinants have a macroeconomic interpretation. The first factor is an unobserved inflation target, the second factor is annual inflation, and the third factor is a 'Taylor rule residual', which, among other things,...